By D.C. Fawcett, Business Building Coach to the Foreclosure Industry

When real estate investors evaluate their options for securing deals and making profits, there are several things that may come to mind. Whether its preforeclosure, short sales, or bank owned foreclosures, investing is still based on similar principles, such as seller motivation. After all, real estate foreclosure sellers are naturally going to be more motivated and the motivated seller is the ideal client for most investors.

Where do most people turn when they seek opportunities in real estate foreclosures?  Sure, they take a look at foreclosure listings that comes from free or fee-based sources. They can also market their services and attract sellers in foreclosure by these means. While these sources may lead to productive and profitable deals, they also can be time and cash intensive.

Another option to pursue is the world of bank owned foreclosures. When a property is lost via foreclosure it goes back to the bank and then becomes one of the now thousands of bank owned foreclosures (or REO properties) on the market today. How do you access bank owned foreclosures in your business?

The key is real estate training and also to work with a real estate agent who specializes in bank owned foreclosures. With the abundance of bank owned foreclosures out there, more and more realtors are promoting these opportunities and can provide you with foreclosure listings to aid in your own pursuit.
Despite the leads you can generate from foreclosure listings and the opportunities that exist with bank owned foreclosures, I think the greatness of the current market also can be risky for the investor because, without the proper foreclosure training, you run the risk of not really knowing what you are doing. Profits can be lost and so too can bank owned foreclosure opportunities when you lack the proper real estate investing training.

I assure you that there are indeed unlimited deals to be found within the realm of bank owned foreclosures. Whether you’re just curious how to make money with foreclosures or really dive in and engage in serious investing (made easier with quality real estate training), there is a place for you in this business and you owe it to yourself to pursue it.

In today’s market, bank owned foreclosures as much as part of real estate foreclosures investing as any other part of the business. Make sure you have a realtor on your team who can provide you with foreclosure listings for bank owned foreclosures because the deals are out there. I also suggest that you commit yourself to real estate training, and your pursuit of bank owned foreclosures, will be more productive and more rewarding. I wish you the very best in success in real estate foreclosure investing and in business as a whole.

Technorati Tags: bank foreclosure, Bank Owned Foreclosures Listing

If you have been looking at the real estate market, I’m sure you have noticed that many of the homes up for sale are advertised as short sale. Buying a home for under the amount that is owed on the real estate is called a “short sale.” In the current real estate market, there are many short sale options open to a potential home owner. Adjustable rate mortgages and the economic downturn have caused higher than normal foreclosure rates. If you are in the market to purchase a home, this is the ideal time to exploit the market to your own advantage. With some precise research and an open mind, you may find the home of your dreams at an unheard-of price.

Locating a Short Sale Quickly
 
To initiate the short sale process, meet various real estate agents. Many real estate agents already are knowledgeable in dealing with properties that are short sales. Selling agents often have pre-existing association with the lender that is holding the mortgage. You want to use a realtor that has experience and information on how to get a property that is a good value. Once you settle on a realtor, let him or her know right away that you are looking for a short sale property. This will help the realtor find an ideal property more quickly.

Short Sales are Often Bargains

A short sale will often be offered at a good price to the buyer since the bank does not want to have their assets tied up in the property. A bank is vulnerable to losing a substantial amount of money in a foreclosure proceeding. The listing price is minimal and so you will not have to try bargaining with a seller over the price. The bank wants the property sold as quickly as possible to eliminate losing any more money.

What to Anticipate When Buying a Short Sale Property

The process of buying real estate in a short sale is a little different than purchasing a home from an individual because you dealing with an corporation instead of a person. Once the bank accepts your offer, the title company working with the bank will handle all of the title and escrow details of the purchase agreement. With a short sale, as a buyer you have to proceed swiftly. The title company and the bank may not act as quickly owing to the large amount of paperwork involved in selling a property in this manner.
 
To speed up the process of purchasing a home in a short sale, get all of the required documentation in as quickly as you can. Generally there is a month or more before your closing date but that does not mean that nothing is going on. There is a complicated behind the scenes process involved in the mortgage documents and the transfer of the property. Keep in touch with your lender and realize that you are dealing with a corporation and not a person so the process will be a little different. The time before closing will slide by, and you will be in a great new home.

Lee Bell
http://www.articlesbase.com/real-estate-articles/buy-a-short-sale-for-a-great-deal-712659.html

If you have a home home mortgage loan that was issued through Countrywide Bank that you fear may in danger of foreclosure then you don’t have to wait for a government bailout package that may or may not come through. This is because you can get immediate relief right now through an independent program that is being offered by Countrywide Bank.

Your Need for Relief Must Be legitimate

However; to qualify, your needs must be legitimate. This means that you must be delinquent and be able to demonstrate unoqivically that the level of you home loan payments are such that you they are in effect driving you towards home foreclosure.

Get Your Story Together

Begin by crafting a letter that details how you found yourself in your financial predicament. Remember that this is not a charity operation that they are running but simply a business proposition for those who they deem eligible. So explain how you got yourself into the mess your in and how you plan on getting yourself out of it.

Show them a Way out if You Quailify

Foreclosures are not anything new and no bank is going to throw good money after bad, so if you can’t show them a light at the end of the tunnel if given a loan restructuring deal then don’t get your hopes up too high.

Compile All Your Financial Records

So gather together any financial document that you can get. This would of course include pay stubs and any bank records that you may have. Also include any and all documents concerning anything that you owe on and are still making payment such as a car.

Be Open and Honest

Bear in mind that you will have to sign your name to any contracts that you agree to and just as with any loan agreement all laws apply. So don’t go in expecting to B.S. your way into anything that you can’t sign your name to because bank fraud is still against the law. Also, if you have been watching the news recently then you may already know that there is a new emphasis on accuracy in declaration  in bank loan agreements so be absolutely truthful.

Benedict Reckard
http://www.articlesbase.com/loans-articles/hope-for-homeowners-and-how-to-stop-foreclosure-669982.html

Q: Does routine forced reduction of Realtor short sale commissions by Banks
amount to a form of extortion that falls under the RICO ACT?

Suppose we have a small group of powerful bosses whose names, by
coincidence, all end in a vowel (Fargo, Chase, B of A, etc).
They target a small class of defenseless business people (Realtors) in a
very distressed neighborhood (Las Vegas, or your home town). 

These people already owe the bosses a lot of money (on 1st and 2nd mortgages & HELOCS), so the bosses proceed to syphon off half of their business (REO listings = the
majority of closed transactions each month) and give that business only to
those who the bosses directly control (A very small group of
REO listing agents.  Bank of America recently said they added only 3 realtors
to their REO approved list in 2009 IN THE ENTIRE U.S. and NONE in NV; to
get on the list one needs a year’s experience in REO sales; tough to do if
you don’t already have REO listings. Didn’t our tax money bail them out? Shouldn’t they spread these real estate jobs around a little? Why, no! That would be … inconvenient.)

The bosses further squeeze the business people’s income on what is left  (By reducing short sale commissions by 25-33% routinely and often refusing to
approve the final HUD 1 closing statement unless “someone,” usually the Realtor, agrees
to pay for additional items on the HUD per bank demands at the 11th hour) and they keep it for themselves. The bosses have the peoples’ main industry (real estate) by the throat (Banks control REO sales, approve all short sales, and loan the money to any non-cash buyers).
When, due to declining income, the business people (Realtors) can’t pay back their
loans, the bosses take their houses and sell them at current discount
prices (in Las Vegas, Feb 2010 avg price is roughly 80% below Feb 2006). The business men lose whatever equity they paid down (5 to 20% at 2006 prices) and the bosses keep that for themselves, too. And then they come after the people for the deficiency at the old inflated prices, demanding payment despite the fact that the bosses have intentionally damaged their ability to pay.  (Q: Didn’t the bank make an implied promise under Equity Law NOT to damage their barrowers ability to repay the loan?)

This “routine reduction” applies to hundreds of short sale transactions each month in Las Vegas alone.  When Realtor income is down by 60-75% already, it feels like a systematic shake down. The bank is not actually a party to the short sale contract -  it is
merely a beneficiary of the closing. The Realtor can’t say no to a commission reduction without losing his entire commission.  If he refuses, the bank has a “gun to the head” of the transaction.  If the transaction does not close, the bank gets the property anyway via foreclosure. If the Realtor stands up for his rights, he may breach of his fiduciary duty to his client.  The bank order is an offer he can’t refuse because of FEAR of greater loss.

The commssion is reduced by an order called a “short sale approval” that arrives on
bank letterhead, signed by a bank officer,  and 100% of that amount is retained by the bank. For the Realtor, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

To make the math easy, let’s suppose a Commission of 6% (split between listing and selling agent) on a $100,000 short sale house is reduced by a bank to 4% = a $2000 reduction.
Multiply this by 569 Las Vegas short sale transactions in January, 2010 = $1,380,000 in additional bank profits in one month.  At this rate, the 4822 short sales closed in Las vegas in the past 12 months = roughly $9.6 Million in lost Realtor income in Las Vegas alone, all taken from the people who can least afford it. The average price per residence was actually $140,000 for the same period, so the $ amount is probably considerably higher. Multiply this by every city across the country and you know where the bank CEO bonuses come from. (GLVAR data)

It’s a lot of money.  Tony Soprano would be proud.

Grant House

If you have a home home mortgage loan that was issued through Countrywide Bank that you fear may in danger of foreclosure then you don’t have to wait for a government bailout package that may or may not come through. This is because you can get immediate relief right now through an independent program that is being offered by Countrywide Bank.

Your Need for Relief Must Be legitimate

However; to qualify, your needs must be legitimate. This means that you must be delinquent and be able to demonstrate unoqivically that the level of you home loan payments are such that you they are in effect driving you towards home foreclosure.

Get Your Story Together

Begin by crafting a letter that details how you found yourself in your financial predicament. Remember that this is not a charity operation that they are running but simply a business proposition for those who they deem eligible. So explain how you got yourself into the mess your in and how you plan on getting yourself out of it.

Show them a Way out if You Quailify

Foreclosures are not anything new and no bank is going to throw good money after bad, so if you can’t show them a light at the end of the tunnel if given a loan restructuring deal then don’t get your hopes up too high.

Compile All Your Financial Records

So gather together any financial document that you can get. This would of course include pay stubs and any bank records that you may have. Also include any and all documents concerning anything that you owe on and are still making payment such as a car.

Be Open and Honest

Bear in mind that you will have to sign your name to any contracts that you agree to and just as with any loan agreement all laws apply. So don’t go in expecting to B.S. your way into anything that you can’t sign your name to because bank fraud is still against the law. Also, if you have been watching the news recently then you may already know that there is a new emphasis on accuracy in declaration  in bank loan agreements so be absolutely truthful.

Benedict Reckard
http://www.articlesbase.com/loans-articles/hope-for-homeowners-and-how-to-stop-foreclosure-669982.html

Duration : 0:0:0

Duration : 0:0:0

Duration : 0:0:0

Why You MUST Defend Your Foreclosure

I have seen thousands of cases, where the homeowner that is facing a potential foreclosure or is already in foreclosure, simply give up and walk away from their home. I can readily understand the pain and hopelessness that goes with this tragedy.

Once someone gets behind on their mortgage payments for a multitude of reasons, they are already ‘teetering” on the brink of credit disaster. Being in the credit industry for so many years, I have had hundreds of clients come to me and after reviewing their credit reports, the one single entry that triggered denials for a mortgage approval was the mention of “MORTGAGE LATES” on a credit report.

Once you have that MORTGAGE LATE on your credit report, the lending industry looks at it in this fashion. Now, whether or not, you “didn’t want to make the payment” “couldn’t make the payment” or “simply forgot to make the payment” don’t make any difference to the underwriters. You see, in the mortgage industry, there is a function called “desk top” underwriting. Your loan file is sent in and the credit report is analyzed automatically and those mortgage late payments automatically trigger a denial.

Now, let’s get back to “why you should defend your foreclosure”. When you defend your foreclosure you force the lender to produce the original note or a certified copy of it. But, if you have been reading any of my previous articles, or any of the other articles available relating to “lost note affidavits” you have to understand how your note was securitized and used and collateral to fund an “ASSET BASED TRUST” of which you knew nothing about. PERIOD. I can rant and rave about the scams and fraud in the industry, but I have already published enough articles on that portion of the industry that when combined might be a small book.

Read the following paragraphs over and over. It, just might affect your family’s entire credit future. You see, once you are late on a mortgage payment, it is reported to the credit bureau, either Experian, Transunion or Equifax as being (30) days late. When, you,  miss the next months payment the mortgage payment is reported as (60) days late.  When the third payment is reported you have a (90) day late on your credit report. Mind you, there is no foreclosure reported on your credit report.

Here is where so much mis-information has been thrown upon average people and those that provide the information should be sanctioned for it. Even though, there is no foreclosure on your credit report at this time, those in the lending industry already know that being (90) days late means the lender can start the foreclosure proceedings. So, now enough damage is already done to your credit report to eliminate any future credit approvals for another mortgage loan.

These peddlers of “credit trash” tell you in their fancy brochures to “sign here” and eliminate the “foreclosure” showing on your credit report. Hell, the majority of the damage is already done by then. The process down the line, once a foreclosure has been legally filed is the “lis pendens” which is the notice to foreclose. You still have the option at that time to sign a “deed in lieu of foreclosure” with the bank and that simply eliminates the additional cost to them. They like this, because it saves them money. You might not be aware, but a foreclosure action costs the bank thousands of dollars.

You save them money by signing a “deed in lieu of foreclosure”. This is how the event is kept off of public records. But, let’s get back to the defense of your mortgage. When you are sued by the lender, who is the plaintiff in this scenario, you defend this by asking the court to have the plaintiff produce the actual note or a certified copy thereof.

Now, there are some states that allow a lender to re-produce the note under oath. But, even though, they might have produced a copy of the note, UNDER OATH, the same rules prevail with that re-production as with the original note. The note must have shown all assignments and endorsements along with it. The endorsements and assignments MUST be recorded in the county records to show the public that the note is legally owned by the party of which it was endorsed to.

Okay, let’s make it simple. IF, I give you a check  made payable to you and you give it to another party, guess what? You have to sign the back of the check and endorse it, in order for the next person to legally own the check and be able to cash it.

A mortgage note follows the same procedure. Now, when you appear in court, or even if you answer the complaint and make the plaintiff produce the note, in the majority of cases they fail. Now, here is what the Judges have ruled throughout the country. You can get samples of these cases by going to my website. The Judges have ruled that the “plaintiff has no standing in court because they are NOT the owner of the note”.

This is so important for you regarding your credit report. We know the credit reporting agencies have reported what the furnishers of information have provided to them. BUT, when you confront the credit reporting agencies with a copy of the court’s ruling regarding the ownership of the note, the credit reporting agencies are reporting information from someone, whom the courts have determined do not own the note, illegally.

How can someone that has NO INTEREST in a debt, report information on a consumer? This would be tantamount to letting strangers report information to a credit bureau because they had a grudge. This is the ONLY ammunition that I know of, that gives you a chance to eliminate those ninety day lates and even the foreclosure entry.

Now, if you fail to defend your foreclosure, and the plaintiff gets a default judgment, you have given up any chance of helping yourself. Run this by your attorney or accountant. Hell, they don’t understand this portion of the law and they will say “let me research it” and you spend thousands of dollars letting them practice on you.

Hope this gives some light to your candle of life. You deserve some honest answers and a total understanding of our system.

Respectfully,

Regis Sauger  Author/Speaker

Regis Sauger
http://www.articlesbase.com/credit-articles/why-you-must-defend-your-foreclosure-701153.html

The real estate marketplace can fluctuate dramatically and unpredictably leaving as many stories of failure as there are stories of success.  The best way to help stack the odds in your favor is to have a solid real estate investment business plan.  A business plan is a detailed outline that includes a clearly stated objective and a how you are going to achieve that objective – in this case real estate.  It should contain methods of securing financial support, either through partners or loans, and be able to describe ways of limiting fiscal risks.  It should also list certain criteria that will distinguish between investments that are likely to provide a profit and those that are likely to create a loss.  Finally, it should delineate clear methods of procuring a steady stream of buyers.

The first step to success is to find potential investments.  The basic principle to follow is to buy low and sell high.  Situations that depress a property’s asking price include foreclosure, owner death, IRS issues, illness, divorce, relocation and job transfer.  In a number of these cases, a bank or financial institution assumes ownership over the asset.  Hoping to reclaim some of their financial losses, they sell off as much of these assets as possible.  This typically happens to houses that have come under bank ownership.  The asking price for these houses is generally much lower than market value.  These types of situations are advantageous to an investor because a lower asking price ensures a higher profit margin.  A successful real estate investment business plan should include as many of these beneficial opportunities as possible, thus increasing the likelihood of a greater profit margin.

The next principle of any business plan is to secure the funding needed to get started and keep the process going.  When dealing with real estate, this part is usually straight forward and easy.  Ideally the money for the initial investment would come from your own savings or a trusted partner.  In this way, while you are risking your own money, failure would not harm your ability to garner future loans from banks or mortgage lenders.  However, not everyone has enough personal capital to begin buying real estate.  This is where proven time tested techniques are utilized to secure the funds needed from joint venture partners or private lenders.  Both of these groups are mainly interested in two items; One - how secure is their money and Two – How much will they be paid.  As long as it is a truly good deal you should have no problem finding the money.  Do not be afraid to share some of your profits to your money partner, better to share some than not be able to do the deal and make nothing.   The idea is to secure the loan, purchase the property, sell the property, and then pay off the investor.  Using this method you can buy real estate without any personal financial commitment.

Finally, a real estate investment business plan should include a stable method to facilitate a deal with your exit strategy.  This should consist of a manner to procure buyers, in the marketplace. There is no shortage of these, and it is a way to close the deals that ensures the highest possible profit margin possible.  It may be a good idea to hire an advisor at this point if you are not confident with your own experience.  In the beginning it is a good idea to re-invest the profit.  In this way you can create more opportunities to earn more money, thus securing the ultimate goal: financial success. 

K. Van Liew
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/real-estate-investment-business-plan-a-detailed-outline-for-success-701369.html